bernie sanders

On the issue of Bernie Sanders, the fact is that American imperialism cannot expect to function without the semblance of political legitimacy. If they expect the American population to go on green lighting wars, consuming, and generally ignoring the finer details of what the ruling class is up to outside of our borders, they’ll have to buy them off with at least the expectation of economic opportunity. Consumerism is bread and circuses, and so long as they’re providing this, the mainstream “left” will look the other way.

But they aren’t able to keep their hands out of the cookie jar and they’re rapidly cannibalizing the American population in the same way they have cannibalized any number of countries where the U.S. could support an oligarchy or dictatorship against its own people. It’s becoming clear to more and more of the population that they aren’t on the team, not even as junior partners or bottom feeders. The legitimacy of this ruling class will increasingly come into question until the point where a segment of mainstream begins to view them like they would view any foreign occupying power.

Even if they can, as ever, deflect the blame for a failed economic and political system on to scapegoats for the benefit of the populist right, how long do we think that this will work when even libertarian defectors from the Republican party are blaming the banks in addition to immigrants and whoever else they imagine stole “their country” from them.

If Sanders is serious and he can actually enact many of the domestic reforms he’s suggesting, what he will have done is made ordinary Americans beneficiaries of the U.S. imperialist system. If you think about it, he’s the mirror image of Ron Paul. Paul called our imperialist foreign policy “wars for special interest” and amazingly brought up the U.S.’s ouster of Mossadegh in a public debate. Paul had foreign policy (in many ways) right, but his domestic policy was atrocious. Sanders has domestic policy right but wants (apparently) an atrocious foreign policy.

It would appear that this is the choice the ruling class will be giving us, should the two party system fail to give them the air of legitimacy: We can have a more rational foreign policy or a rational domestic policy, but not both.